Looking Out My Window

I am sitting inside the RV with the sun shining and wondering if my other home, Dragonheart is okay.  It seems that Mathew is sitting over Guatemala and drenching them.  I am sure that the 4+ inches of rain won't leak in any where. LOL!  A boat always leaks.  Everyone tells me she is okay so....

This actually a moth

Here's looking at you

Looking outside this morning I saw that the hummingbirds were out.  Coffee and camera in hand I got ready to get some shots.  I hope you enjoy them.

Waiting his turn

This tastes good

Me next

Coming in for a taste

What a great way to spend the morning.  It sure beats worrying.

Who Am I...and Where Did I Come From???

Yesterday was spent with my Mom and Dad.  We were working on our Genealogy.  I know you thought this was going to be "The Sex Talk".  Too late for that one.

In 2006 Mom bought the discs for Family Tree Maker.  Ancestry.com is the culprit.  We bought her a laptop and started filling out what we knew off the tops of our heads.  Dad provided some comedy when we asked him his grandmother's name.  "Grandma" was the reply.  No we wanted her birth name, which we were pretty sure was not Grandma.  After some digging and not much help from Dad we found her given name.

My Great-grandma, Adaline

We quickly found that we had hit a brick wall.  We had collectively emptied our brains of any family that we knew.  Mom thought that she had some information that someone had given her sometime in the past.  Who knew if it was even us.  We didn't even know how to check at that time.  So the paper went back into a folder in a cabinet and set there.

I will admit that living on a sailboat in Guatemala did not lend itself to helping mom much with her search.  Life happened and we all just let things sit.  Sure I thought about it and wondered if we would start up again, but then my plate was pretty full so nothing happened.

Well things have changed.  Mom got the new 2011 edition on Family Tree Maker with all the additions and bells and whistles.  Let the adventure begin.

We commandeered the kitchen table, set up her laptop, and printer.  Folders came out and we set down for some serious looking.  It was hard to start up after our vacation, but we persevered.  We watched tutorials.  Some of them several times.  We set aside time to watch the Webinar that evening hosted by Ancestry.com.  Don't we sound like we know what we are doing?

Well THANK YOU for the updates to the program.  We found a mother load!  People share their trees now and you can get hints.  We need hints badly.  We are such neophytes at this.  We aren't even sure how to get organized.  We print out everything.

That leaf means a hint

  We had dad making folders, bringing us paper, buying an external hard drive.  At one point we talked about a whiteboard and posting the working tree on the wall.

We laughed, we cried, we hooted and hollered.  We began to say names like a mantra...Ethelbert, son of William and Mary.  Ethelbert married Mary Jane and their children are.....

That paper that has been in a cabinet for years...turns out we are related.  It has opened a lot of doors for us.  We have barely scratched the surface.  We have, however, started.

Real Food

 

Vegetables and Fruit.....

I like most vegetables.  Except for peas, lima beans, and okra (unless it is fried).  My kids like vegetables.  I really for the life of me can not remember a time when I used trickery to get a kid to eat a vegetable or a fruit.  I love fresh fruit.

It is a texture thing

Fry it and I will eat it

Apparently tricking your children, husband or acquaintances to eat vegetables has become a multi-million dollar business.  Watching TV commercials proves that out daily.

I once sat all night with peas in my mouth

V8 – fusion or Splash are fruit flavored vegetable juices, one way to get everyone to drink his or her daily requirement.  You can have Fusion or Splash and never touch are real fruit or vegetable.  But watch out as you drink a counter will appear over your head keeping track of your vegetable intake.

Mott’s Medley juices will do the same thing.  As Marcia Cross (actress from Desperate Housewives) the paid promoter will tell you.  “Sometimes you just can’t get your kids to eat their fruits and vegetables like they should.  It takes a little magic to get them to eat right.  Enter Mott’s Medley Juice, just the magic you need to get those kids to drink their daily requirement.

Mom and Dad may not be listening to all this commercial crap, but I bet the kids are listening.  The message that they are hearing is that REAL fruits and vegetables are BAD things.

When I started this blog I thought I was the only one concerned.  Thank God I am not!  There are plenty of mom’s wondering if all our kids are picky eaters.

I understand for some people it is a “texture thing”…trust me, that is me and peas and lima beans.  Oh, and slimy okra in soup or gumbo.

May-be we do a poor job of introducing fruit and vegetables to our babies?  May-be we are poor role models for our children.  If we aren’t eating fruit and vegetables then how can we expect them to eat healthy food?

 Most agree that Madison Ave. has hit on marketing to young children to get Moms and Dads to buy replacements for real food.

I agree with Cynthia on Daily Cyn. (This is not me or is it Cynthia)  Peel an orange, cut up a carrot, hand them an apple, share a bunch of grapes, or make a salad with them.  Kids involved in cooking tend to eat healthier.

Let’s get excited about real food.  Last but not least, can we please turn off the  TV?

Purpose and Passion

I need purpose.  I don’t play well with others unless I have a sense of purpose in my overall life.  If Cindy is unhappy with Cindy…well she ain’t happy with nobody else.

So I am on a quest,  a quest for purpose.  You would think as a daughter, sister, aunt, mother, grandmother, wife, nurse, and counselor that I would be filled with purpose.  Well something is missing.  I can’t tell you what “it” is that is missing, but I know it.

I figure as long as I am on a quest I should have a good time on the journey.  This journey will take some twists and turns.  They may not make sense, but I am sure that they will be important.

Lately, partly because I have really great FREE unlimited WIFI I have been surfing the web.  Right now it is recipes.  I find myself drooling and salivating and talking to myself about ingredients. 

I have fallen in love with Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman website.  I truly don’t know how she does it all.  Blog, home school, photographs, conventions, keep house.  I know how she does it.  She is a woman.  She multi-tasks.  She took a passion a purpose and made it work for her.  I am sure she is making money at all this.  In fact, I know she is because I bought her cookbook on Amazon.

Fortunately for me we currently are in Tucson where my parents live.  Michael is now well enough to visit so we set out yesterday with grocery bags full, recipes in hand and took a step on the quest.

Last night was a dinner of Provolone-Apricot-Stuffed Chicken. The recipe was courtesy of the Rachel Ray magazine.  One rule of thumb for me is…if there are pictures of the food, then I am more likely to cook it.

Rachel, Ree and all the contributors for all the food sites have great photos.  So I also packed my camera when I went to cook.  Now if only I would have taken a meat mallet.   Never fear, being a cruiser has taught me that you can make do.  And make do I did.  My dad lent me my grandfather’s hammer to pound that chicken.  Worked great.

Dessert was a recipe from The Tasty Kitchen website.  Apple Dumplings.  The different ingredient in this recipe was a can of Mountain Dew.  Yes, Mountain Dew.  OMG they were to die for…

 

Now for the best part of the entire dinner, drum roll please – The Clean-Up Crew!

Books, Books and Banned Books

While visiting with my parents the other day they shared an article about Banned Book Week, Sept. 25-Oct 2.  The article was written by Betsy Towner.  Betsy got me to thinking about books. 

Books have always been some of my best friends.  I received the gift of book lover from my Mom.  She always has at least a couple of books going.  She instilled in me the love of a good book and the rules for taking care of books. 

1. Always use a bookmark
2. Never lay a book down open- it will break it's spine
3. Please don't dog-ear a page
4. Keep the cover on to protect it
5. Don't write in it

I am sure there were more rules and I know that I must have broken most of them.  But, back to Banned Book Week.  It is not what you think.  The week is to celebrate our right to read what we want.  Who are we to judge another's taste?   As I read through Ms. Towner's list I realized that I had read all but three of the banned books.  This is her list:

Too Political

1. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
2. All Quiet on the Western Front -  Erich Maria Remarque
3. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemmingway
4. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemmingway
6. Animal Farm - George Orwell
7. 1984 - George Orwell
8. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
9. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
10. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse - Peter Matthiessen

Too Much Sex

1. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
2. Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
5. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
6. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
7. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
8. Peyton Place - Grace Metallous
9. Rabbit, Run - John Updike
10. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
11. Jaws - Peter Benchley
12. Forever - Judy Blume
13. The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
14. Beloved - Toni Morrion
15. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Julia Alvarez

Irreligious

1. On the Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkin
3. The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
4. Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya
5. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling

Socially Offensive

1. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
2. The Scarlet Letter - Nathanial Hawthorne
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
4. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
5. Brave New Worlds - Aldous Huxley
6. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
7. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
8. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
9. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
11. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
12. James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
16. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
17. Cujo - Stephen King
18. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
19. Ordinary People - Judith Guest
20. A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley

Personally I was shocked by all of the above titles.  Some were required reading in High School and some in College.  I want you to know that I plan on reading the three that I haven't as soon as possible.

 If you love books then please:
Visit your library, download a book, read a book, share a book, read a book to someone who can't read, have a child read a book to you.
And please help the American Library Association celebrate, "Banned Book Week".

You can learn more at: American Library Association